Couple things to keep in mind about such reports in general:
Cops always provide worth of the drugs based on street prices for individual sales, so these are always grossly inflated. Bulk prices are much, much lower than the retail price users end up paying after all the middlemen have taken their cut. But cops don't want to give realistic numbers, they want such busts to sound like heroic victories, so instead of saying "they would have sold the entire shipment off for an estimated 2 millions", which would be realisitc, they go with the 28.8 million they're worth at the retail level, even though no single dealer involved with the distribution ever sees that much money from the sale.
Amerika bases sentences on total weight of drugs. Other jurisdictions determine purity and charge people with the actual amount they had in their possession, the US just dumps the stuff on a scale and runs with that, which means that if you have a couple barrels of lab waste containing trace amounts of LSD, you get charged with possession of a completely absurd 93kg of LSD like it happened to Pickart when they busted his laboratory.
The 15 kg of fent pills we're talking about here still are a lot, ofc. The 250$ he allegedly got paid for the smuggling sound way too little for an amount that will get you 20 years in supermax prison. Just putting some context out there for how the cops like to talk such busts up to make it sound as if they're winning the drug war.
It has to be some kind of blackmail or something similar. Not only why was he in Mexico, but why would the cartels trust him with...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/thirty-two-kilos-fentanyl-worth-288-million-seized-and-two-dominican-nationals-arrested
like $14m worth of drugs.
God damn, yeah it really sounds like there's something to the arrangement not being brought up in the article
Couple things to keep in mind about such reports in general:
Cops always provide worth of the drugs based on street prices for individual sales, so these are always grossly inflated. Bulk prices are much, much lower than the retail price users end up paying after all the middlemen have taken their cut. But cops don't want to give realistic numbers, they want such busts to sound like heroic victories, so instead of saying "they would have sold the entire shipment off for an estimated 2 millions", which would be realisitc, they go with the 28.8 million they're worth at the retail level, even though no single dealer involved with the distribution ever sees that much money from the sale.
Amerika bases sentences on total weight of drugs. Other jurisdictions determine purity and charge people with the actual amount they had in their possession, the US just dumps the stuff on a scale and runs with that, which means that if you have a couple barrels of lab waste containing trace amounts of LSD, you get charged with possession of a completely absurd 93kg of LSD like it happened to Pickart when they busted his laboratory.
The 15 kg of fent pills we're talking about here still are a lot, ofc. The 250$ he allegedly got paid for the smuggling sound way too little for an amount that will get you 20 years in supermax prison. Just putting some context out there for how the cops like to talk such busts up to make it sound as if they're winning the drug war.